Research has revealed heart disease claims the lives of at least 51 Australians per day, prompting the Heart Foundation to launch a new online tool which helps people work out if they're at risk. The Heart Age Calculator combines data about a user's age, body mass index, diabetes status and family history to ascertain heart age. In 2017, more than 18,000 people died from heart disease.

Women more likely than me to die of a heat attack. Picture: iStockSource:Supplied

A scandalous gender discrimination in healthcare means women having a heart attack are being misdiagnosed, given substandard care and are twice as likely to die shortly after a big heart attack as men.

Today News Corp Australia is calling out this unconscious bias in the system which has an incalculable human impact as families lose their mothers and chief carers.

And we can report that the Labor Party has pledged to provide $300,000 to help tackle the problem by funding a national education campaign on women and heart disease run by the Heart Foundation.

Thirty community organisations will be given $10,000 each to raise local awareness of heart disease and the ways women can reduce their risks of heat disease.

“We will use the Heart Foundation’s Australian Heart Maps to help identify communities where Labor’s investment is most needed,” opposition health spokeswoman Catherine King said.

Health Minister Greg Hunt has also responded to the campaign by writing to Professor Gemma Figtree, chair of the Australian Cardiovascular Mission asking her to oversee and develop a response to the matters raised by the Heart Foundation and to help improve women’s cardiac diagnosis and design a national strategy for improved clinical response within emergency settings.

Inherent discrimination within the health system is causing misdiagnosis for a lot of conditions affecting women.Source:Getty Images

“Our Government welcomes News Corp’s engagement on this important health issue,” he said.

The discrimination against women who have heart disease starts with the fact that women are 12 per cent less likely to be screened for heart disease and are less likely to be prescribed blood pressure medication than men.

It continues with the startling revelation that only 15 per cent of cardiologists in Australia are women when international research shows women fare better when treated by a health practitioner of the same gender.

The inequity goes even further with experts admitting most heart research is focused on men and while 65 per cent of the participants in clinical trials are men, just 31 per cent of studies report outcomes by sex.

Even when women do go to the health system seeking care, doctors often miss the fact they are having a heart attack and they don’t get access to the key tests or treatments that men do.

In 2016-17 only one in three coronary angiographies and echocardiographs were performed on women.

Women are less likely than men to be counselled by doctors to take their medication or have their condition and recovery properly explained to them.

The terrible end result of all this discrimination is that the death rates in women from heart attacks is higher than men.

Every year 38,000 men and 19,000 women are admitted to hospital for a heart attack, however, despite this gap, 3,600 women die almost as many as the 4,500 men who die from one.

Research by University Sydney cardiologist Professor Clara Chow studied what happened to women with heart disease in 41 Australian hospitals and found women were less likely to get a coronary angiogram, less likely to get preventive treatments and less likely to be referred for cardiac rehabilitation.

“There is still a feeling it is a man’s disease,” she said.

Melbourne cardiologist Dr Nick Cox says “a lot of the research and medical text books are based on descriptions of male patients while women experience symptoms differently to men and are discriminated against because medical education doesn’t recognise that”.

News Corporation and the Heart Foundation’s #ShowSome Ticker campaign which has focused attention on heart disease as Australia’s leading cause of death last week won bipartisan support for a new Medicare funded Heart Health Check or Australians at risk.

The Heart Foundation is starting a campaign to improve the understanding of heart attack symptoms in women.Source:Getty Images

Today we are partnering with the Heart Foundation to call on the federal government and the medical profession to:

* provide $11.6M over 3 years to fund a public education campaign to help women and their doctors understand how the symptoms of a heart attack in women can be different

* ask the federal government to provide extra funding for research into women and heart disease so we can better understand why heart attacks are different in women and whether different treatments are needed.

A public education campaign is desperately needed because women experience heart attacks differently than men.

While men have a crushing pain in their chest and breathlessness, the symptoms in women can be atypical like nausea, jaw, shoulder, neck and back pain.

This is why women often ignore their heart attack symptoms and don’t get help in the critical first two hours which means their heart damage becomes permanent.

The Heart Foundation says a national public awareness campaign should encourage women to have a heart health check and know and respond to the warning signs of a heart attack.

The Cardiac Society’s Dr Leonard Kritharides said heart disease in women it is more likely to occur in the small rather than large blood vessels and we need to know whether different treatments are needed.

“Smaller blood vessels are harder to treat with stenting and the outcomes after some procedures are different in men than women and more favourable in men,” he said.